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Heather Mallick’s favourite books of 2012

Alice Munro, Katherine Boo, Jian Ghomeshi, Andrew Nikiforuk ...

Residents of the Annawadi slum in Mumbai go about their business as a luxury hotel looms in the distance. Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a stunning portait of slum life; no sentiment and sap here. (INDRANIL MUKHERJEE / AFP)

It was not a splendid year for books, as the great publishing shakeout began. Digital publishing began to overtake ink and paper, publishers went under and authors were poor, no change there. Great fiction was thin on the ground and most of my choices for Best Books of 2012 are non-fiction, many Canadian. But they were wonderful. Take a bow, Andrew Nikiforuk, whose The Energy of Slaves broke new ground.

In the meantime, here are some great books picked from a huge pile. I couldn’t read everything, though I did my best, and many fine books were sadly left off the list:

The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude, by Andrew Nikiforuk

Physical labour was once done by slaves. Post-abolition, it was done by coal and oil. Fossil fuels are mankind’s new slaves, worked to such an extent that our need of them has made slaves of us. Try doing without electricity for 10 minutes. Try 12. Andrew Nikiforuk, Canada’s greatest journalist, has written a stunning book that approaches the coming disaster in a startling way. We are the plantation slaveowners of the planet. The average North American consumes 23.6 barrels of oil a year, the equivalent of the work of 89 human slaves. As the era of cheap energy reaches its end, what will we do without our slaves? I have never read a better book on the way we live now, on the plain fact that the Industrial Revolution did us in. The fact that The Energy of Slaves has received little attention is proof of the chaos of the publishing industry, journalism and our own self-love. But it sure is nice here on the plantation, 50 appliances sweating away for my personal comfort as I type this.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo

Critics unreservedly loved Beautiful Forevers, so it must be loaded with sentiment and sap, correct? No, this reportage is like a loaded gun. Journalist Katherine Boo spent many years visiting a Mumbai slum next to the airport, but separated from its immaculate acreage by an ad for Italianate wall tiles. The gleaming walls read “Beautiful Forever. Beautiful Forever.” I cannot condense the horror of the slum life she describes, the sewage lake rats eaten raw, the fungus fanning out from feet like wings. Wouldn’t these people be better off dead? At one point, a young slum boy being beaten by his mother wonders if he has a life. He thinks, “If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too . . . . . A boy’s life could still matter to himself.”

Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro

We live in a crass literal age and it’s reflected in modern fiction where, when things go wrong, characters are fed their own pancreas, deep-fried. When things go wrong in an Alice Munro short story, it’s as if a moth has sighed on an eyelid, but the consequences are no less catastrophic. Vulnerable people make small sudden decisions and their lives take a permanent turn for the worse. This being Munro-land, they soldier on. Munro writes horror stories for the clinically sensitive. The last four in this collection, she warns, are somewhat autobiographical, which turns readers into Munro detectives.

Cool, Calm and Contentious, by Merrill Markoe

I have always been hugely fond of Merrill Markoe, one of the creators of the Letterman show. She writes elegant, humorous essays about life in California, most of them about her dogs, which are easily as stupid as humans. This is her best collection to date, because it bleeds. Markoe has ripped the scab off, which is a writer’s duty. Markoe’s mother was a hall of fame narcissist and a pot of rage. When tender and terrified young Markoe wrote her first screenplay, she bravely showed it to her mother. Her reaction? “Well, I don’t happen to care for it. But I pray I’m wrong.” The problem with lousy parents is that you go out into the world without armour. You are fodder for monsters. All women should read Markoe’s account of her campus rape and her mother-induced passivity. Also, heed her advice. Don’t sleep with David Letterman.

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, by Taras Grescoe

All five of this Canadian journalist’s books have been golden, but Straphanger is Taras Grescoe’s best. He travelled around the world — Copenhagen, Paris, Moscow, Bogota — studying mass transit, meaning how people are getting about in dense cities getting denser. A city is no place for cars, with their cost, pollution, kill rate, parking acreage, gridlock and uglification. The car is unsustainable. What are the alternatives? Bicycle, buses, streetcars, elevated light rail, subways, rail and bullet trains are being enjoyed worldwide. Grescoe writes in a wry conversational style that doesn’t conceal his passion for repairing the planet and preparing for the hotter years ahead. Last night I spent 90 minutes driving downtown. It should have taken 20. Everyone stuck in a traffic jam should be reading Straphanger. Get a grip, you people.

Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, by Ginger Strand

Editors plead for fresh angles on old stories. Strand has a truly unnerving one. In the mid-1950s the U.S. began building the 43,000 miles of the massive interstate highway system, aimed at fending off recession and creating “prosperity, connection and growth.” Instead it bred sprawl and social isolation. A tiny group found these unpoliced freeways extra-useful: serial killers. Most serial killers stick to an area. Interstate killers are on the move. The easiest victims are “throwaway” people — runaways, drifters, prostitutes — for whom any search is easily abandoned. Who can do this without drawing attention? Long-haul truckers. Strand even suggests that trucking — deregulated, non-unionized, rootless — may attract serial killers because this kind of opportunistic murder is just so easy. Truck stops — what criminologists call “risky facilities” — are magnets for killers and the “less dead,” the prostitutes whose lives have so little value that “their deaths mean less as well.” Strand’s work maps an undiscovered country.

1982, by Jian Ghomeshi

“In 1982 I lived in Thornhill.” Whatever the merits of Jian Ghomeshi’s book — and the thing is simply packed with quality — he had me at the first line. “I shall arise and go now,” Yeats wrote, but Innisfree had nothing on Thornhill. It has always fascinated me how clever people grow from sparse soil. Not that Thornhill is sparse, I hasten to add. It has green lawns and many sprinklers surveyed by the men of Thornhill. Ghomeshi lists them: stationary, rotary, oscillating, pulsating and travelling. Talk about the hissing of summer lawns. Ghomeshi, Persian and just arrived from 1970s Britain, where he was called “Blackie” in school, was determined to find his way into coolness, to build a life. His assistants were David Bowie, The Clash, Rush, Talking Heads, black garments and a crush on a girl named Wendy. He had a public humiliation and a moment of great shame, both of which he bravely recounts here — gold star for you, Jian — while growing up to be a great musician, journalist and inspiration to small-town hopefuls everywhere. Recently, the CBC’s ombudsman had to deal with a CBC-hater’s complaint that the CBC was over-publicizing its employee’s book. (Ghomeshi is a CBC radio host.) He ruled against the complainer. I urge readers to buy 1982. I didn’t love it, I over-loved it. File another complaint, you big jerk.

Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored, by Tom Lubbock

Tom Lubbock, who died at 53 of a brain tumour in 2011, was the Independent’s art critic. As another great critic, Laura Cumming, wrote of him, “Almost anything could be made interesting once it had passed through his mind.” This marvellous book reproduces 50 works of art and a short essay unpacks each one. Lubbock disliked the “unfocused emotional response” and instead described each work meticulously and cast a net of disparate knowledge over them. I admire Lubbock as much as Simon Schama and Adam Gopnik, but those men write long. Lubbock’s little tin can of words is just as moving and full of nuggets. He quotes Henri Bergson on the fact that nature isn’t funny. “The comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.” This is true. Try laughing at a tree. Can’t be done. This compact art book is a model of its kind.

The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days: A Novel, by Ian Frazier

I didn’t like Ian Frazier, thought him the dullest of the dull New Yorker writers, until he invented the Cursing Mommy. She’s a suburban housewife with a husband named Larry and two boys, and I see her as a cross between actress Julianne Moore and U.S. Congressman Barney Frank. This is the diary of her surreal speedy American life. Her husband’s hobby is collecting capacitors*, one child is a fainter, the other is “horrible and wretched,” she is at war with her ceilings and her book group has been retroactively unhinged by the Bush administration. For the Cursing Mommy begins the day with cheery affirmations as do all Americans who are suckers, and ends in a bloodstained frenzied tangle of wreckage and despair while she turns the air blue. There is a war in the Cursing Mommy’s head between personal intelligence and mandated stupidity, just like when she drinks 38-per-cent-more-caffeine coffee and pops one of her kid’s antipsychotics. “Half of me was going about 90 miles an hour while the other half remained cement.” The Cursing Mommy’s life is not sustainable, like the nation itself. Every day concludes with a deeply felt “Oh, what a -------- horrible day this has been.” And I think we can all agree on that.

* passive two-terminal electrical component used to store energy in an electric field

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, by Chrystia Freeland

Plutocrats aren’t the 1 per cent who are hogging all the money but the .01 per cent, the new rich who call themselves poor when they’re down to their last few billion. Chrystia Freeland, digital editor at Thomson Reuters, wrote her first book, Sale of the Century, on the oligarchs hauling gold out of the crumbled Soviet Union. This revelatory book takes oligarchy to a new, almost unimaginable level. We are in the second Gilded Age and Freeland has sat down with the planet’s new robber barons. They are another species. We are scissors, they are rock. Rock beats scissors. Plutocrats will send an electric alarm through your small, underpaid body.

Moranthology, by Caitlin Moran

The great joy of this collection by Britain’s funniest columnist is that it teaches the pointlessness of shame. Moran, a feminist spitfire and truly splendid writer, once showed up at a job interview with a cake in a suitcase. At age 15, she had won the Observer’s Young Reporter of the Year contest. She thought a lemon cream sponge might be a nice gesture. So she opened the suitcase to find the lemon cream sponge had collapsed in the August heat and started to sour. “An uneasy smell of vomit-cake fills the room. Everyone looks at me. In my head, I type out the sentence ‘Write about this?’ ” And a great career was born. P.S. Buy her first book, How to Be a Woman, too. Buy both. Learn how to be a woman. A funny woman.

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, by Andrew Solomon

We resemble our parents vertically in that there are qualities we inherit from them, race, height and so on. But what about children born very different from their parents, distant from them on a horizontal axis? Solomon spent 10 years researching the bomb that goes off when children are born with Down syndrome or schizophrenia or brilliance. What about children born of rape, or who become criminals? What about child prodigies? When the apple falls very far indeed from the tree, how do parents and children relate? This is a magnificent book, blessedly free of sentiment and packed with the oddity that, to my mind, is actually the norm.

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